Counting Down, Bleeding Through
by User 4575
Summary: What made President Hayes change his mind at the last minute? With bonus Jack-angst. Spoilers for Continuum, which this is set in the middle of.


_They were right._ That was Colonel Jack O'Neill's first thought on seeing the odd, tetrahedral ships in the sky. _Al'kesh._ Now, where had that come from? _Ten long, hard years of fighting the bastards, that's where._ What? No, it couldn't be. He must have remembered it from those weirdos' reports, that's all. _Probably Carter's. I always did pay more attention to her than any of the others, especially Mitchell._ But this just wasn't possible. How could he be remembering what could only be the _him_ from the other timeline? It hadn't happened. All of them agreed on that. But those ships - _those Al'kesh_ - were in the sky. The aliens - _Goa'uld_ - were here. In his life. Both his lives. Maybe that led to the old timeline bleeding through a little, who knew? _Carter was always better at that kind of stuff than I was._ There it was again.

_Eleven years ago, your son Charlie accidentally shot himself with your gun._ That was _his_ memory. From _his_ life. It's what that Daniel guy had said to him back on the sub; that was when he'd known that they were nuts, or at the very least big trouble. _Eleven years ago, your son Charlie accidentally shot himself with your gun. _It wasn't real. It hadn't happened to him. But the timelines were bleeding through. _Eleven years ago, your son Charlie accidentally shot himself with your gun. _He'd spent most of the last year trying to put those words out of his mind.

**BANG! BANG! **The gunshots rang out from his bedroom, filling him with an eerie sense of deja vu. He sprinted desperately up the stairs, frantically dialling _911_ on his cell phone over and over again, until he reached his son's prone body. It was too late, he knew. He looked over the boy's (and didn't he look young, now? Barely eight years old, even though he was nineteen) cooling corpse at his wife, and knew. He _knew_ that their marriage was over. That though she might one day forgive him for this, she'd never be able to forget. And though he'd never forgive himself, sometimes he'd forget. Sometimes.

_Put it back._ He cried, silently. _I take it all back. Eleven years and I'll have found a way to live with this! Please, Sam, Daniel, Cam, just put it back to the way it was._

Major General George Hammond sat in an underground bunker, and worried. He trusted the three displaced veterans, _SG-1_, his mind supplied, to solve this mess somehow. But why? Two days ago, he wouldn't have (hadn't) dared put them anywhere near their fields of expertise, for fear that they'd try to resurrect their timeline somehow. Now, he trusted them with six and a half billion lives. _More than that._ More? _I trust them with every life in the galaxy. Hell, I have trusted them with it, more than once!_ No, he hadn't. _He_ hadn't. But as the strangely-armoured men - _Jaffa_ - marched down the hallway, he found himself countermanding his own orders. _Things were better the way they were. We should have believed them. There's no hope for us now, not even SG-1 can save the world with no back-up._ He picked up the phone, and met his chief's eyes. "Tell them to do whatever they have to do."

Henry Hayes was a religious man. That said, he found himself with some decidedly un-Christian feelings when speaking to this Ba'al fellow on the phone. And if this was the first time anything even remotely like this had ever happened, and it was, why did remember doing something distinctly similar in the Oval Office? _That was Anubis, though._ Anubis? What on Earth? Or what off it, he supposed. _It had, after all, been a hologram_. What? Where was this coming from? And why was he feeling so uneasy about the orders he'd given to the trio he'd sent out to fix this? _SG-1. _It wasn't the fact that he'd sent a one-legged man to save the world with a kettle and some string, either. _It's the fact that you distinctly ordered them to leave things the way they are. Wrong._ How could this be happening? He struggled with himself. As he received the report that the enemy's soldiers (_Jaffa_) had broken through to his level, George picked up the phone. _He should be retired by now. Retired and playing with his grandchildren. _He met his old friend's eyes. He'd know what to do.

So, you liked? Hated? Please, review. It's rare the fic-bug bites at midnight, I'd like to see what y'all thought.


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